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The Rules

I love my children. I love the way their laughter echoes through the short hallway of our home. I love how they are so self driven when it comes to their school work. I even love it when my darling Anna practices her flute; or when Emily has a solo in the school play and I am required, as an attentive and nurturing mother, to listen to and appropriately critique each practice. Even when she practices the song, in its entirety, fourteen times in a row.

I also love to watch the dynamics of their relationships. Sure, there’s drama. With a teen-aged girl, another girl who believes she is already teen-aged, and a boy smack dab in the middle of puberty, there is bound to be drama. Most of it plays out on my phone, by way of text messages.

Luckily, the boy is mostly concerned about Halo Reach and how soon he can shave. The girls – well, now, that’s another matter. They feel they must be connected to their friends, day and night, via text messages.

I haven’t heard of any support groups for parents of text-addicted girls, but I can assure you that when the ad runs in the paper, I will wrestle the phone from my girls and call the hot line number.

I might even share what I have learned. All this, of course, will take place before those lovely men in white coats jab me with a sedative and buckle the straps of my straight jacket.

I can remember the good old days, before cell phones and I-Pads and instant messaging. I can remember when a ‘tweet’ came from a winged creature and ‘google’ was neither a noun nor a verb. Google wasn’t even a word, back then.

When I was a kid, we actually wrote notes by hand, on real-live paper, and passed them back and forth to friends in the school hallway, on the bus, when the teacher wasn’t looking.

My generation had abbreviations, our own version of code.

LYLAS: translated, meant Love Ya Like A Sis.

2Gether4Ever: well, needs no translation, really.

Oh, there were others, all right, but they pale in comparison to modern code.

My girls know they are allowed to use my phone for texting. And they also know that if Momma doesn’t read the messages, the children don’t text. One deleted message and the privilege is gone. The only problem is that texting seems to be a foreign language, the sole purpose of which is to make me feel old and confused.

Recently, because I am such an attentive and ‘hip’ young-ish mother, I sat down with my girls and we had a text-translation party. And now, I pass my wisdom to you.

IDK: I don’t know.

LOL: Laugh out loud; could double as Lots of love/laughs.

OMG!: Oh my goodness! (My children aren’t allowed to take the Lord’s name in vain.)

G2G: Got to go.

R: Are, and U: You, and N: In.

IDC: I don’t care.

CU2moro: See you tomorrow.

TXT: Text.

WUT: What.

LUMTA: Love you more than anything. (definitely check the sender on this one!)

I promise, it took me fifteen minutes to stop being confused about this ‘less than three’ business. My ten year old helped me to understand.

I must admit at this point, that before my text-education class, I was in the business of being an old fogey. I corrected misspellings, grammar, punctuation. One time, I sent a five-page text to one of Anna’s friends, wherein I detailed the proper homophone to use, the part of speech, and used the word in a sentence. That particular friend never texted back.

I also struggled with trying to ascribe words in my internal dictionary to these abbreviations. For example: LUMTA could stand for Lemurs Under Mango Tree Arbors. OMG could stand for Oscillating Male Giraffes. IDC could stand for Indigo Dance Cats, or Intelligent Driving Chihuahuas. Of course, they didn’t make sense, but what does these days?

I have come to a sort of acceptance of this texting thing. In the spirit of being a groovy Mom, I have made my own acceptable abbreviations and require the girls to use them liberally.

And now, I pass these on to you:

MBINS!: My brother is not stupid!

DUKMSIW?: Don’t you think my sister is wonderful?

IBESETV: I believe everyone should eat their vegetables.

N,UAMMPTDM: No, you ask my Mom permission to date me.

AUC?ITYTD!: Are you crazy? I’m too young to date!

And this one is my favorite because it is appropriate, yet shows how much flexibility I still have in my old age.

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2 thoughts on “The Rules”

Iove your new abbreviations! Luckily, my teen doesn’t like texting; it’s my friends and my sister who have dragged me into modern times. But I am SOO SLOW at it. And refuse to abbreviate, except for LOL. Although I think I will have to teach my girls MBINS, and N,UAMMPTDM! 🙂